Research on Carrier, a dialectally diverse Athabaskan language of the central interior of British Columbia, has resulted in a fairly large amount of information stored on-line. The material I have includes lexical databases for seven dialects containing over 33,000 Carrier entries, plus associated root and stem lists. I also have some text on-line, a small portion of it annotated. The database system is home-brew, based to a considerable extent on standard GNU utilities such as AWK and Emacs. It serves two purposes: (a) allowing me to search for data; (b) generating printed dictionaries for use in the Carrier community. In this talk I will describe this system in further detail, discuss desired improvements, and present some issues that it raises.
A number of improvements would be desirable. These include: (a) linkage of lexical data to texts; (b) linkage of lexical data and texts to audio recordings; (c) inclusion of derived acoustic phonetic data; (d) representation of morphological and syntactic structure; (e) an improved approach to the inclusion of phrases with variables, which are often the translation-equivalents of English verbs; (f) relations joining databases for different dialects; (a-c) would probably be straightforward to implement within the existing system; (d-f) raise more interesting issues;
Three issues present themselves: (a) how best to link these databases with other databases, such as the Carrier-Sekani Tribal Council placename/map database, or the Alaska Native Language Center comparative Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit database. (b) the pros and cons of using a home-brew system rather than a commercial database system; (c) the apparent conflict between features that facilitate my research and features that would make it easier for Carrier people and other non-specialists to enter or look up information themselves.